Curation details you might not be aware of!

I know what you may be thinking - "curation"? What's that? Although probably half of the existing Steem Power resides in bid bots now there are still users trying to make the most out of curation and might actually enjoy doing it. Sure they are playing a losing battle, especially with SBD being valued so much thus the returns of delegating to bid bots are much higher. Hence maybe a refresher for curation might be a good time. You might learn a few small details you didn't know existed, especially if you are new to the platform.

Curve

Since voting moved to a linear curve - meaning that each of your vote always gives out the same value depending on your current voting power and Steem Power, curation rewards are still on the quadratic curve.
This means that if you are first to vote on a post that has a low payout which later happens to receive a lot of bidbot votes, you will be rewarded a lot more steempower than the minimum of your voting power.
As an example, I would usually receive between 4-5 SP per 100% vote on a post if no one else were to vote on it after, but on this one post which I voted at almost 0 rewards and went up to ~500$ I have these upcoming curation rewards:

Source: steemworld.org

There are quite some people trying to better their curation results, @abh12345 has a weekly curation league where he shows statistics of the best curators if you are interested in following them.

Penalty

There is currently a penalty in place that was originally created to counter curation bots that would just vote on posts as soon as they were posted to get most of the curation rewards from it.
Basically if you vote on a post that was just posted (at 0 minutes) 100% of your potential curation rewards will automatically go to the author. I am quite surprised how so many users are still not aware of this.
The penalty diminishes gradually up to 30 minutes when 100% of the potential curation rewards go to you, at 15 minutes its 50%.
A post is divided in 75% going to the author with 50% being SBD and 50% Steem Power and 25% going to curators as Steem Power. This means that if you happen to find a post at 30 minutes and resteem or share it with your whale friends after you've cast your vote, your curation rewards have the chance to maximize. Some times though, especially on popular authors it can be more tactical to curate earlier, sacrificing curation rewards but still receiving more steem power if a few large votes are to land on the post before the 30 minute mark.
Autovotes used to sport this, people checked at what minute mark other users were autovoting on and front-running eachother to receive higher rewards.

Voting Power

As most of you know by now, you have 10x 100% votes per 24 hours. This means that when you are at 100% VP your 1 vote will burn exactly 2% voting power bringing you down to 98%. To be the most efficient with your voting combined that you'd vote on good posts that would get you good curation rewards, it would make sense to always vote when you are at 100% voting power. This way you use the most rshares at your disposal and may get the highest returns possible. Rshares are units of your voting power that influences the rewardpool decision on how to distribute the newly created Steem and SBD, they can be found on steemd.com if you click the "advanced mode" when viewing a post.

Voting power burning is flexible though. If you decided to vote 50x in one day and expect your voting power to reach 0% because each max vote burns 2% of your VP than you have another thing coming. The burning efficiency decreases depending on your current voting power, say you are at 50% voting power, your 100% vote will only burn 1% power and at the same time give rshares worth the same as if you had cast a 50% vote at 100% voting power. The lower you go the more votes you can cast, but in the end it results in pretty much the same outcome. The disadvantage here is if you know that a post is going to make a lot of rewards then you not being at 100% voting power to cast a 100% vote will mean you will receive less curation rewards from it.

In case you were to make a post and want to reward yourself the most then you'd have to vote yourself as early as possible since most of that voting power will go straight to your author rewards and make sure that you are at 100% voting power. This is about to change though in the next hardfork where the penalty ends at 15 minutes instead of 30 and votes cast before that go back to the reward pool instead of going to the author.

If you see curators giving you 100% votes, it may not always mean that they are at 100% voting power, you can use sites like steemnow.com or steemworld.com to easy check the voting power of their 100% votes. If I had a Steem for every time someone in the beginning used to ask me "hey, I voted 100% on you, why did you only vote me back 20%?". Not to mention the difference in Steem Power we had to effectively vote trade but you found out that user was also at 5% voting power cause he went around doing the same on everyone thinking voting power grows on trees.

Another detail/bug I believe very few users know about is that at a certain percentage under 2. It was discussed some time ago but was not for certain exactly at what (1.50%-2%) your votes burn the same amount as if you voted wit a 2% no matter what. I.E. if you vote with 0.5% it might not burn the equivalent in voting power and you might just be wasting the remaining up to 1.5% voting power by not voting with a 2% minimum instead. I see a lot of accounts and even curation projects doing it because it is quite hard to notice any difference.

Some great tools you may want to use for a more efficient and easier to check curation on your posts and others I would recommend steemworld.org. Recently they also added a "coming curation rewards" which shows all of the curation rewards you have incoming for the week, this can help to make your rewards more efficient by trial and error. Steemdb.com/@username/curation is also a great site that shows you your history of curation rewards with a daily percentage which can motivate you on how to improve daily. It's a percentage game and if you get good at it it can mean that the next day you have a chance at earning even more due to previous rewards while fighting against a decreasing inflation.

If you have any questions about curation or things you are confused about in the post, feel free to ask them here in the comments. I am not the most technical person about how everything works on the blockchain exactly but I like to think I know the rules of it quite well. :)

I get really excited whenever I get a notification from ginabot that you've made a new post and I actually check it out and it isn't a gaming post lol. I actually learn a lot from most of your writings and this isn't an exception.

My SP is worth close to nothing at the moment and earning curation rewards was a bit of mystery for me just over 3 weeks ago. I read a lot of things about how curation rewards work in my early weeks on steemit but I couldn't fully grab it. @themarkymark made one of such interesting posts and even though it confused me a lot I followed his advice of curating on a post between the 25th and 30th minute of the post's lifespan.
On a very few occasions, I'd receive 0.001 or 0.002 sp as curation reward until I recently started using steemauto to upvote on some minnows posts with potential good enough return but with few curators.

My curation rewards earnings have slightly increased to around 0.015 at times to 0.004 at least recently and it's kinda cool.

What I am yet to fully grasp is this, since my sp is still lower than 500 I don't have the voting slider and reducing my percentage of the vote to lower than 100% with steemauto would mean my upvote is close to worthless, do I still earn rewards at 100% upvote but with 60% voting power?

Yes, if you are at 60% voting power and vote 100% it's as if you had voted 60% at 100% voting power. It's all in the rshares. Considering you're SP is low and you want to make sure to reach 0.001 SP curation rewards minimum on each vote I'd suggest to let your voting power be as high as possible.

I appreciate your kind gestures and especially these tips you've given out today. I have met steemians who would charge sbd or steem to teach minnows stuff like this.

My voting power limit is currently set at 75%. This way i would still have enough vp to manually curate on good contents i find on the feeds page without expecting curation rewards. Might seem small but little drops of rain do fill a cup of water.

Hey @acidyo, mind if I ask? I know this is somewhat not related to the topic, but how about the division of author rewards? Say for example, a post has gotten $100 in upvotes right after the 0 min mark, and then gets $50 more after the 30 min mark. Does that mean that the total $150 will be divided to 75% to the author and 25% to the curators, or the whole $100 is given to the author and the $50 is the only one to be split between the author and curator rewards? Thanks.

the whole $100 is given to the author and the $50 is the only one to be split between the author and curator rewards

Yes this one due to the penalty. Most posts give out less than 20% curation rewards, its quite uncommon to see any at exactly 25%, it would mean most votes would have had to appear after the 30 minute mark like the one in the screenshot on my post.

Come on man , I have missed on so much.
I didn't know anything about that. No one discussed the penalty issue before.
That's something important I have missed on this platform.
Thanks for this information though. Will help a lot.
Cheers mate.
How's your gaming going on, CSGO and league of legends?

Yeah sure. I haven't been able to watch your live stream lately. But I will get back to you after sometime.
Tell me brother how the heck do you get this much upvote in such a little time.
Seems a mystery for me.

As a red fish it is hard to score some curation rewards. The best thing one can hope for is that the author uses bid bots on his posts after you managed to upvote the post. Steembottracker has a great functionality build in, called front running the bots. There you can see who is using bid bots to upvote their posts. Giving you some time to upvote it before the bots do.
Are you really getting 17SP as curation? Or did I misunderstood it? Impressive because it is more than my average weekly author rewards 😁
Cheers,
Peter

That's just impressive. My records stands on 0.054SP, which actually isn't quit so bad with only 500 SP. Good luck with the blocktrades contest, you are doing an amazing job with that one!
Hope that I will eligible to participate, because I did edit my post and changed the X into a T before I knew that I need to wait for a mention of the bot. :(

I see lots of articles here on bidbots: some in support, some against, and some neutral on them. I think that when users sign up for Steemit they take the home page marketing at face value: provide high quality or upvote high quality and get rewards. However, the complexity of the relationship between votes and rewards is not that simple. In fact, it is so complex and depends on so many dynamic factors the its likely that one can only optimize ROI (or even come close) by automating voting: hence bidbots. While there are certainly good arguments for doing this and some bidbots still vote in alignment with content quality, it seems all to easy to design them to maximize ROI regardless of quality.

I'm referring to the ones that claim to (at least sometimes) give a return. The ones with a whitelist of high quality steemers seem to be a good way to encourage quality if you have enough SP to make a difference.

This is a really helpful post. One point I still don't fully get (which was kind of asked earlier but I don't quite follow the answer!) is what happens to votes after the 30min mark? How does this work into the curation 25%, if at all? Does the 25% curation allocation extend beyond the 30 min mark? So if I say upvoted 24hrs after a post was published would this get curation rewards equal to a vote cast at 31 mins (assuming same 100% voting power etc)?

You just spoiled my day. Because I know I can write exactly the same post and then it gets upvoted for less than $1. 😥

Of course I know about building up and such kind of arguments. But it remains frustrating. So once in a while I just feel like complaining about this! Sorry it's below your post, cause as far as I know you, you did and still do a lot of great things!

Anyways I got an idea how you can make it up. By answering at least one question.
Of you upvote your own post how will you receive the curation fee? And how can you see how high this curation reward is?

If I upvote my own post after 30 minutes I can still receive a curation reward yes. Steemworld is a great tool to show how big your upcoming curation reward is, but most people would just vote on their own post instantly after being posted so they get the rewards as author rewards instead.

So now I conclude that directly upvoting your own post is useless if you want to earn some of the curation fee from your own post.

Yes it will go directly to your post rewards instead. If you vote at 15 minutes, then 50% of your potential curation rewards will go to your author rewards, etc. If you are the only voter and you vote at 30 minutes, you'd receive 75% of your vote as author rewards and 25% as curation rewards in SP.

Considering SBD is valued more than SP - the blockchain sees SBD as $1, so it gives half of the author rewards as SBD and half as SP, but the SBD are worth about 1.7x more than SP so its not 50-50 because someone is buying SBD above the price of $1, it means you'd make more rewards by voting on your post as early as possible and then trading your SBD for Steem or other currency.

What I meant is that if you self vote your own post directly at 0 minutes and 0 seconds that you won't get any additional curation fee. That's because you basically don't get any curation reward from the upvoters behind you. Plus of course what you explained that the reward is a full author reward.

I now doubt if I'm right about the first part of my theory. If you look at the pay out below, I know this author always upvotes his own post directly with approximately $8 upvote value. That leaves $10 as remaining author fee. So I would expect to see a maximum of $2.50 for the curation reward. But the curation reward is only $0.64. This very low curation reward should then be caused by many other upvotes in the first minutes. That's not impossible, but it does make me wonder if I fully got it or not?

These are information that one cannot get ordinarily. I dont think they are even available on the white/blue or yellow paper or whatever it is called. How did you get this versed about steemit? You should probably open a channel to mentor folks in this regards....if that would not add further load to your bulging scedules.

Great to have these info and thanks a bunch for taking time out to write this.

I'm kinda new on steemit, and I feel a bit intimidated seeing the reps of all these commenters. Y'all must have done a lot to get here. Any ways, I understood some of the things you said @acidyo. But it's a bit hard keeping your eyes on posts to know when is the right time to vote. Personally, I've not seen anything on my curation rewards record, this indicates that I have never yet been rewarded for curation.

It's quite hard to get to the minimum 0.001 SP CR with only 15 SP voting power. Focus on posting and connecting with other Steemians until you reach a higher SP! Often a vote can mean more than the rewards it gives when getting in contact with others through their posts/comments. :)

These are the things that I had spend some time to learn even before I started to post here. I suggest it would be better to vote on the good @utopian-io posts to get maximum curation rewards. The 0.01$ upvote of mine is not going to make any substantial difference if I cast it on my minnow friend's post. It would be good to upvote only on posts having quality instead of upvoing on every single posts just because the post is of a friend!

Even I found that upvoting on haejin's posts can earn a lot of SP. I used to do it before I learned the word reward pool rape. Now I have learned the art of differentiating chaff from grain! :)

I think many are just like me, don't care much about how much you get from curation, reasons: If you don't hold much SP, it doesn't make that much difference. Secondly, probably it's too difficult to maximise the curation reward under current econs.

Who is lucky enough to have whale friends? :) This was a really great explanation. I think a lot of people setup autovoters for some of the bigger accounts and they don't understand the importance of setting the timer on when your upvote happens. Making that small adjustment can mean a huge difference in the rewards you get. Of course many of the people doing this have small upvotes anyway, so the rewards are not that much to begin with. I saw a post a while ago that I don't have the link for now that tracks all posts and allows you to search for ones that are close to that 30 minute mark so you can plan your upvote accordingly. This of course defeats the intent of supporting high quality content, but so many people blindly upvote stuff these days anyway, I don't know if it would matter.

The struggle is real no matter what size you are :) Thanks for the great feedback. I always enjoy following which game you are playing at any given moment. The fact that you throw in thoughtful/helpful posts like this one just makes it even better!

Ya, i have a couple of guys i've met on the blockchain. We've been motivating each other to grow together...though some haven't been able to withstand the storm of the dwindling prices of steem and sbd.
Hoping to connect with more people outside of Africa though...we never know where the riches of crypto would land us in the nearest future.

This was very enlightening for me. Being a new user at the platform there's so much to discover and learn. This is the kind of post I'm really eager to read on Steemit.
Thank you for taking the time to explain. 👍🏼

Honestly, I didn't know any of these details. As a minnow you never worry about how curation works, because you think "Oh, my VP is so weak it will not benefit me regardless of how I use it" but actually it's a good strategy to upvote potential posts that are very likely to receive big upvotes (quality content). Also if someone is a bot bider, you can also benefit from that before they buy it, lol.

Personally I give my upvotes either to Minnow's quality content or contests that require it, that way my "worthless" upvotes become WORTH.

On the other hand I have a question. Is it true that if someone's rep is higher than yours you don't get any curation rewards from their posts?
I've been told this, and I'm wondering if it's true or not.

I just added this post to my bookmark because theres a whole lot of things therein I have to learn. I just learnt how early voting affect ones creation. I actually had no idea how it works. Thanks for sharing sir I'll re read and ask more questions as I advance

Just finding this post, thank you very much for taking time to write it for your fellow Steemians @ acidyo! Should result in a nice ROI for you!!

In one of your responses, you indicate reputation has nothing to do with curator rewards. Respectfully, I am writing to ask you to revisit this question.

In my short time actively engaged with Steem, I have personally watched one particular poster's reputation plummet down into the negative territory. Resulting in their subsequent posts (not sure they are aware yet …) not even being visible to me a follower or, presumably, anyone else.

[Note: I personally am opposed to the "bot" message which I kept seeing that warned Steemians away from this Steemian's posts, since I think it was false, but that would be another post somewhere else …]

Hard for me to imagine, therefore, this "downgraded" Steemian is generating much if any curator rewards when no one can see their posts. I would be very appreciative of your perspective on this.

Even better? Given your obvious expertise? Write a similar post on "all things reputation!"

Hoping to hear back from you on this post. Either way, this post has been of great value to me, so have 100% upvoted, resteemed, and bookmarked it.

Wow This is very interesting for me that I am new to Steem because I do not know about this system of voting and healing and thanks to this you have clarified some doubts I had! Thanks for the information I find very useful

Interesting facts about curation. It is great to know about the 30minutes penalty. I have learnt how to vote smartly so as to earn good curation rewards. It is sad though that it won't amount to much at the end but its worth a try.

Thank for this information @acidyo I didn’t know anything about this .... since i used steemit I know lot of new things about it and this is because of you people

If you see curators giving you 100% votes, it may not always mean that they are at 100% voting power, you can use sites like steemnow.com or steemworld.com to easy check the voting power of their 100% vote

Now I saved < Syeem now.com and steemworld.com> On my note ..... thanks

great post, friend.
I'm new to Steemit and I still learn how to apply the votes to the people who write to me. I feel the duty that, as they write to me, I must vote them and thus they receive their reward, even if it is minimal or null.
I am really reading and learning how to make the most of my time in Steemit and also, one day, be able to help other people as you do.

Thank you very much for the update. I was not aware at all about the 0 minutes penalty. Will be careful in the future. Still not able to decide voting percentage but that 2% bug is also something to be aware of.

Wow thanks for the info!!! But I've often heard a lot of steemians saying the 30 minutes trick doesn't work for them except those with higher Steemit power, don't really know how true it is though. Thanks once more @acidyo.

Thanks for sharing valuable information that most of the users are not aware of...
I do have some confusion regarding SBD
Even if market cap of SBD is less than 50,000,000 amd still it does have more value than steem ..i mean how is this possible....what is it that i am not getting right ...

Thanks @acidyo for writing this, I did have one question about this part.

As an example, I would usually receive between 4-5 SP per 100% vote on a post if no one else were to vote on it after, but on this one post which I voted at almost 0 rewards and went up to ~500$ I have these upcoming curation rewards:

Just to clarify, do you mean that if you gave a 100% upvote to a post with no upvotes before or after you, you would get 4-5 SP when it paid out (25% to you the curator)?

Whoa this is something hilarious. I mean it s been a month sice i ve been on steem and i were not awsre of any curation rewards or whether thrir power decreases till zero with in just 30 minutes.i wasnot aware of the penalty issues aswell. This is great. You actually mean that when you have avoting power of 1% and you vote someone then 2% of it burns and you decline to 98%. But this decreases over time. Really impressed by tgis article of yours. It will prove extrwmely helpful for newer steemians like. Rrally @acidyo i would love to see kore of sucb posts from you. You explain very good.

This was really helpful mate thanks. I feel like I'm always learning on the platform. At first I would only upvote posts that I felt weren't getting enough attention to try and help them but then learnt that with low SP there's not much you're doing for them until you upgrade beyond minnow status.

It's interesting what you say, sometimes we think that leaving the self-voting can help us receive better rewards from authors who publish quality content, but when they do not only receive a minimum amount of that

It would be helpful if Busy or Steemit had something to notify when a person publishes, I think it would be a good tool and we would all be more aware to win a little more in the curatorship, I even think that if something like that would give more votes to the publications because if you have 10,000 followers everyone would know that you published the final and everyone will want to win by voting and automatically the post would receive more profits.

Good evening @acidyo and thank you for enlightening us explaining some things that not everyone knew.

What curation awards? :D When you are a little guy in this vast steemit sea, curation rewards are small and rare, something you can fantasize about only :) That being said, all that you wrote is beneficial to know when curating and this is one of the most educational posts on curations that I have seen so far. The only thing missing are the dust votes, but hey, I had to be picky and find some tinny thing in this perfect post :D

Thank you for sharing this with the community, it will shine some light on curation and hopefully help people realize that things are not as simple as they thought. Kudos for your effort and educational support. 💚

This is the kind of posts that remain a sticky subject for years, in the annexes of user information, everyone should have some basic understanding of the Proof-of-Brain mechanism at its core. Steemit has all the makings of a great network, still a few things remain for improvement. Users should remain steadfast and patient in their efforts, as now we're laying the brick on this road, the path is ours to shape in these early days (it's still a beta, folks). Ahead the lane, the advances in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency poltico carve out the scope the much larger picture we focus on our place in everyday.

I also see quite a few users (probably all newbies) voting for posts and comments older than 7 days. You may add this to your post to be complete, the 6,5 days and the last 12hrs where votes are not counted anymore.